DistroWatch Weekly

A weekly opinion column and a summary of events from the distribution world

DistroWatch Weekly

Reader Comments

1 • No subject (by war on 2005-08-29 14:33:01 GMT from United States)
A little late, but better than never!2 • Freespire discontinued ? (by Davide on 2005-08-29 14:41:37 GMT from Italy)
What happen with Freespire ? What kind of problem did this distro have ?3 • RE: Freespire (by ladislav on 2005-08-29 14:45:33 GMT from Taiwan)
I don't know, he didn't specify exactly what "problems" he had with the distribution.4 • No subject (by Anonymous on 2005-08-29 15:08:27 GMT from United Kingdom)
Do you think linspire pulled a winblows in them?5 • last week's distro's (by fred brockman on 2005-08-29 15:22:31 GMT from United States)
re:Freespire--Linspire didn't like it. Payback is murder!!! re::alinux--couldn't get it to install on my machine, it would only load 60percent and then I got eof's errors. I have 160 meg hard drive and 512 megs of ram.6 • love the read! (by lefty.crupps on 2005-08-29 15:27:45 GMT from United States)
ladislav, always a good monday morning, thank you!war: you writing something weekly that needs unnecessary criticism?7 • Thanks (by Anon on 2005-08-29 15:29:22 GMT from United States)
Dear Ladislav: just wanted to thank you for "Distrowatch" and maintaining at very good level of quality and quantity of content. thanks!8 • distroweekly (by KiM on 2005-08-29 16:21:15 GMT from Egypt)
its fantastic reading this effort every week i just want to thank u... i would like to try redflag but can i find it in english..??9 • DistroWatch is excellent (by William Roddy on 2005-08-29 16:44:43 GMT from United States)
Ladislav,

Thank you very much for providing this excellent, consisten, regular service.10 • no (by war on 2005-08-29 16:49:13 GMT from United States)
no criticism, distrowatch is like a drug, I miss it when the time of release deviates ever so slightly :)11 • one mistake (by gabe on 2005-08-29 17:19:51 GMT from United States)
I noticed that Suse Beta release 9/09 is shown before Ubuntu's release 9/08. Thanks for the most excellent reading!12 • Great Job! (by |TG|Mateo on 2005-08-29 17:53:10 GMT from United States)
As always.....look forward too it every Monday.

Say, isn't pocket Linux the first distro with Simple KDE as the default?13 • DCC (by random on 2005-08-29 18:19:54 GMT from United States)
Ladislav another fine issue. I would to see more on the DCC effort. I did use Progeny for awile and the goals were good ones. However for a desktop to track behind Sarge just did not work out for me. I am still interested in where they are going.

Thanks.14 • donations (by bhrich902 on 2005-08-29 18:32:07 GMT from United States)
maybe next donation should go to distrowatch, *wink* *wink*, *nudge* *nudge* :)15 • Freepsire (by Moe on 2005-08-29 18:53:30 GMT from United States)
Freespire ran just fine on my old Dell. It recognized my wireless and we were off and running. I did notice when you shrank the bottom menu line the "L" showed up in place of the "F" on the launch button.

Hmmmm.. I'd love to hear the real story on this distro. In the meantime I'm keeping my copy in a safe place.

There's also a short review on the web, unfortunately I can't find the link right now.18 • pocketlinux (by Rabyte on 2005-08-29 20:02:14 GMT from Germany)
Or this one :-)

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=pocket19 • pocketLinux (by klhrevolutionist on 2005-08-29 20:03:19 GMT from United States)
I can tell distrowatch that pocketlinux is way better than slaxit is an easy to use distro. I'm glad someone finally released a distro with just one app per task! Now I can add what I want!!!I hope the best to pocketlinux and thank distrowatch for sticking it up on the board!!!!!20 • A GREAT THANKS!!!!!!!!!!! (by John Ceulemans on 2005-08-29 21:49:00 GMT from Netherlands)
A Great Big Thanks for Another read of `Distrowatch Weekly`,Thank You Ladislav!!

Greetings to all!21 • Freespire (by ChiJoan on 2005-08-29 22:44:27 GMT from United States)
Thanks for trying, but it would've been better to fork off Linspire 4.5 since Linspire 5 left my Via-C3 700mhz and Intel P3 500mhz out of the running. Or are they going to do a Linspire 5 Lite Version for us? If they aren't, then maybe they'll OK this project and maybe help it with backports or whatever.

Thanks for another great Monday with the DistroWatch Weekly. I have to take a look at Pocket Linux, too.22 • Woah!!! PocketLinux looks exactly what I needed! (by 1c3d0g on 2005-08-29 22:50:45 GMT from Aruba)
Damn! PocketLinux looks pretty awesome! I always wanted a distro like that. Small (but still with KDE), one app per task (like Unix philosophy) etc.... I was even thinking of starting my own distro because I haven't seen any distro with those principles, but now I'm glad I found PocketLinux. Can't wait to try it out... ;-)23 • Another great read! (by Scott Wilson on 2005-08-30 01:14:12 GMT from United States)
I realy hated my morning cup of coffee and no Distrowatch to read. But, I had just got done reading this week edition with my second most favorite beverage: Beer! BSD Hacks, book review nice, but like with many of the Linux flavors, there are many flavors of commands. Jay Kelpacs interview was a very good read and informitive. I just may try Alinux on the PC that I was going to recycle! I am some what concern with the some of the antics of some Distros. Wolves in sheep clothing. How can it be closed source and considered Linux? Linspire, how could you of all people act like MS? If that is the case. Where is Paul Harvey and "the rest of the story"? I will never understand why some Linux Distros try soooo hard in having their flavor look and act like windows. I got hooked on linux by a friend using Red Hat 6.0 and Enlightenment Window manager..Linux had me at the transpartent shell window. For the world outside the USA, Paul Harvey is a national radio host.. rater entertaining here is the link to his site. http://www.paulharvey.com/24 • Freespire? (by Anonymous Penguin on 2005-08-30 01:36:52 GMT from Italy)
This is what I found at the Linspire forum:

http://forum.linspire.com/viewtopic.php?t=411834&sid=fdec8d7ceb3dccd343ad133eb603bb7b25 • Now, The rest of the story (by Scott Wilson on 2005-08-30 02:02:11 GMT from United States)
Anonymous Penguin, How much do what to bet that the Monday morning meeting @ Linspire was really painful. i never use Linspire, so I don't know of the "license agreement". I bet someone was given an choice: work here or leave and start your own company!?26 • UHmmm just a thought (by Scott Wilson on 2005-08-30 02:06:21 GMT from United States)
And you were all afraid of the Red Hatters hiding behind Fedora.27 • RE: Now, The rest of the story (by Anonymous Penguin on 2005-08-30 02:16:16 GMT from Italy)
Very likely, Scott :)28 • irc (by mark_alec on 2005-08-30 02:32:04 GMT from Australia)
Ladislav, whatever happened to #distrowatch on irc.freenode.net?29 • @pocketLinux (by klhrevolutionist) (by livecduser on 2005-08-30 02:54:55 GMT from United States)
I can tell distrowatch that pocketlinux is way better than slaxit is an easy to use distro. I'm glad someone finally released a distro with just one app per task!

I like choices and SLAX does not have much to choose because it is small and with good choices.

Now I can add what I want!!!

You can also add what you want to slax. You just have to remaster it/or just use modules. It can be tricky.

Why is pocketLinux better than slax?Is it because it does not have the bugs found in unionfs?

Does PocketLinux have a livecd like SLAX?Slax is not meant to be installed anyway. It is hard for me to digest a distro that is better than SLAX. I'll have to give it a try and will report back to you and the readers of Distrowatch.

In any case, I want to use certain applications and in the packages list pocketLinux does not come with these. Neither does slax. A fine livecd distro that does this is KANOTIX. It does not get the credit that it deserves. Salute to all, PocketLinux, SLAX, Kanotix, et. all.30 • Freespire (by DrStreet on 2005-08-30 06:14:12 GMT from United States)
I truely wish that Jasp would stick with the name Freespire. Taking him to court after the whole Lindows/Windows mess would make Linspire the laughing stock of the Linux Community. I have to say I have no love for them, after seeing how they charge their members for access to free software through their CNR service.

BTW, in the LinspireNetwork forums they are saying he should drop the use of the colors green and blue...didn't they take that sceme from windows???31 • linux on imac g3 (by im_ka on 2005-08-30 10:19:47 GMT from Sweden)
hi everyone

i'm picking up an imac g3 tomorrow i got from ebay.it's a 500 mhz g3 with 192 mb ram. does anyone have experiences with that config? i'm especially interested in how gnome (ubuntu) would run on it with 192 ram.

thanks32 • No subject (by Anonymous on 2005-08-30 13:44:06 GMT from United States)
I don't know who designed the XP rip-off theme for X, but they deserve to be shot.33 • Pocketlinux quick test. (by nightflier on 2005-08-30 15:27:53 GMT from United States)
Light and fast. You can use regular Slackware packages. Great base install for custom system, but not for beginners.34 • Freespire (by |TG|Mateo on 2005-08-30 16:10:41 GMT from United States)
I like the new name they are floating: squiggle. It's silly, fun, unique, and won't get them in any trouble with Linspire.

Don't know about the whole colors thing. Seems to me that Linspire is heavily branded with the green/blue scheme, and they want to avoid all references to their proprietary product while allowing Jasp to continue his work.

Seems fair enough to me.35 • Freespire...... (by Happy Linux Follower on 2005-08-30 16:20:23 GMT from United States)
To the guy who created Freespire.........You were doing a great thing .......What went wrong?I was looking forward to trying Freespire but now I may never get the chance....Hopefully things change in the future and you decide to continue your work.......36 • Distrowatch (by Mr. Happy :D on 2005-08-30 16:27:24 GMT from United States)
Distrowatch is the greatest site of all time.......In fact, this site is so great that it has been made my home page so I can keep up with all the newest Linux distro's and news as it comes out....

Keep up the great work ......From: The happy Diostrowatch user........ :)37 • @Freespire by DrStreet (by disgusted_Lindows_user on 2005-08-31 01:31:16 GMT from United States)
very well said, why the heck do they charge for programs that are available for free. Klik, which comes with KANOTIX, works excellent and without the crap from Lindows/Linspire. a friend told me that they were not charging for the programs, but for the service that they provide to install programs for beginners which do not know a thing about linux and are intimidated by command lines. They are very much like Microsoft in their strategies. A simple apt-get or a klik away gives you access to the many programs available for Debian and its derivatives. I got Lindows and it did not have tetex, a word processor, and other programs. I got the junior version of CNR and got ksnapshot and several smaller programs. A friend later burned for me copies of Mandrake 9.0 dolphin and Red Hat 9.0 shrike and away we went to much better distros than it. What a shame? They try to lock you in and ask that you get antivirus. Many people know better. Sorry if am too harsh on Lindows/Linspire folks.38 • Freespire (by Raven on 2005-08-31 02:55:14 GMT from United States)
I have a friend who was eagerly awaiting that to be finished. Now I have to give him the bad news. Too bad; I've recommended Xandros OCE to him, and it looks like he'll have to go with that, as he doesn't have the money to pay Linspire to install software for him, and Linspire is about about as useless as Windows without any extra software after the installation.

Oh well. Back to downloading aLinux for me.39 • aLinux for smb media server (by butters on 2005-08-31 04:34:48 GMT from United States)
I need to set up a little samba server on an old and slow (celeron 4xxMHz 64MB SDRAM) machine to serve music and video on a home network. A desktop with a web browser would be a nice, too, if I can get it to run nice on that hardware. aLinux seemed like a good route to investigate until I noticed that the distrowatch page says no samba... :(

Amongst the hundreds of distros there must be one that is particularly suited to samba serving and a light desktop (fluxbox, fvwm, sawfish, etc. would be fine) on old hardware. Vector? Or should I use straight debian or "debian pure" or something like that. You're talking to a hardened linux guru (who hasn't really jumped on board with anything newer than Gentoo), so I don't mind a couple hour's work if it's the best way.

Thanks.40 • No subject (by mixmatch on 2005-08-31 06:00:55 GMT from United States)
If all you want is to run a samba server, I would recommend a distro that can be updated constantly without ever having to re-install and, since it is a much older system, that does not run a distro that you must compile everything. Debian would seem to be a good fit. If so, you would be better off just using the debian.org version as most distro additions have been in the usability features for desktops. My understanding is that Gentoo can also install binaries instead of doing compiles, so it is also an option. You can always go with fedora, mandrake, or suse, but you won't see as much support for the version you are running in 18-24 months.41 • Asianux (by William Poetra Yoga Hadisoesen on 2005-08-31 07:01:26 GMT from China)
Now the 2.0 ISO's seem to be available, but I haven't tried downloading them yet.

Asianux only claims that it's "one of the three major Linux server distributions", not desktop (so you can't compare it to a desktop distro), and I think that's what Red Flag's President says. You know you can never trust upper management ;) Anyway, from what I observe here (I'm a student at Tsinghua University), those few students using Linux usually use Hiweed or Debian. Some use MagicLinux, and for myself I use Slackware. Asianux is nowhere to be seen (mnaybe because it's for servers only?). But anyway my school's servers still use Solaris (maybe even the sysadmins don't know anything about Asianux).

As for the Flash animations, I fully agree with you. That's a sign of developing countries -- they love to steal your attention so much that you can't concentrate on the main topic. Just look at www.21cn.com (China) and www.kompas.com (Indonesia), and I can tell you that they are only minor offenders. And if you take a look at Red Flag, Haansoft, and Miracle Linux's websites, they are better in this aspect. Maybe Asianux's website was designed by some unknown Chinese undergraduate, I don't know.

For the extreme self-praise, I think that's another major "feature" of China: they love to impress people in ways that make educated people sick. I mean, they can impress pointy-haired-bosses, but they certainly can't impress a university student.

As for the success story page, maybe they haven't had a success story yet... that's why they can't share it with us ;)42 • aLinux Review (by Wayne040576 on 2005-08-31 11:51:03 GMT from United Kingdom)
Just read the madpenguin review of aLinux. Good review. The comments about the installer were spot on. I had similar problems with the hardware configuration section of the installer. I let it do the auto config but was unsure of what it had detected. When I booted up it left me at the command line. The graphics card on my test machine is an ati Radeon and I haven't come across a distro that didn't detect it in a long time. Doesn't really bother me but it would have been nice to know if it had been detected or not. I had a few other similar problems with the installer. I gave up after I got the desktop displayed. I think with a little more work it could be a good distro. At the moment, definitely not for beginners. Even the partition setup was slightly confusing. I could imagine that some people could easily wipe the wrong partition with it. The strange thing is that I have installed an older version of peanut linux in the past and I don't remember having too much trouble.43 • Freespire by DrStreet (by John on 2005-08-31 13:13:28 GMT from United States)
I have to agree. I don't understand why I should pay Linspire money to get something that is free from the Debian repositories. I have Debian Pure (www.debianpure.com) installed on my system and I use Kanotix as a rescue disk. Kanotix is cool, but it is based on the unstable branch and that branch is quite broken right now hence the name, "unstable". I have had too many problems upgrading my Kanotix system and decided to jump ship. Debian Pure installed a Sarge system which I later upgraded to testing no problem. I may not have KDE 3.4 and Gnome 2.10, but 3.3 and 2.8 are fine for me right now. Kudos to those guys for giving some people what they want.44 • Freespire (by Liam Kinkaid on 2005-08-31 14:18:21 GMT from Portugal)
Hi!

I don't understand the need to start another distro specially if linspire from time to time gives you coupons to download their distro for free. You don't even have to buy access to their CNR thing because you could use the debian repositories. IMHO this a waste of time and resources that jasc (being a linspire insider) could use to make linspire a better distro.

Best regards,Liam Kinkaid45 • Where's the podcast edition this week? (by xiaobao0707 on 2005-08-31 14:31:51 GMT from China)
The podcast edition is very interesting, but why it is not included in this week's distor week? I hope next week it could appear again.:-)46 • Freespire (by John on 2005-08-31 15:14:24 GMT from United States)
"You don't even have to buy access to their CNR thing because you could use the debian repositories"

Not true. Using Debian repositories with Linspire will eventually break the system unless you are very careful in how you use apt pinning. But I agree that it's pointless to offer another distro.47 • elive pretty neat live but.... (by mikkh on 2005-08-31 16:54:00 GMT from United Kingdom)
Enlightenment 16 and 17 to pick from, nice graphics - I'm going to install this baby

Hmmm, where's all the pretty stuff gone?

It's got a nice trendy login screen, but all the other goodies are not there.

Live - good

Installed - rubbish48 • Freespire and Free Linspire (by Carlos Alberto P P B Santos on 2005-08-31 17:23:25 GMT from Cuba)
Visiting the website of the former Freespire project, I saw that because of the confusion involved between that personal project w/the Linspire, the last decided to give a opportunity to those interested to try a free version of Linspire: it's giving a coupon of US$ 49.95 so you can have a digital copy of Linspire for free, or having a good discount on the boxed version. The website for that is:http://info.linspire.com/freespire/index.htmlI think this was very nice from Linspire, although I don't agree much on how they deal w/Click n' Run, and it's paid subscription for lot's of free programs, easily available from apt repositories.49 • RE: elive pretty neat live but.... (by Anonymous Penguin on 2005-08-31 18:35:19 GMT from Italy)
"Enlightenment 16 and 17 to pick from, nice graphics - I'm going to install this baby

Hmmm, where's all the pretty stuff gone?"

It happened to me: I had logged in as root. Then I logged in as user and all the goodies were there: silly, I know, but please remember that it is based on Morphix.For me the most annoying issue is that I haven't been able to set up pppoe so far. I'll try a script by Kano before I give up.If only more of these new LiveCDs were based on Kanotix...50 • Freespire (by Andrew Betts on 2005-08-31 18:40:25 GMT from United Kingdom)
Hi there. Nice to read your comments :)51 • re elive pretty neat live but.... (by mikkh on 2005-08-31 19:29:48 GMT from United Kingdom)
Ooops, never thought of that, I always log in as root because I dont mind living dangerously on a home setup

Just read this before wiping the CDRW to try freespire instead

So I wont bother now, cheers :o)52 • re elive pretty neat live but.... (by Anonymous Penguin on 2005-08-31 23:18:20 GMT from Italy)
"Ooops, never thought of that, I always log in as root because I dont mind living dangerously on a home setup"

If you are the developer of Freespire, please please don't give up :)54 • Asianux (by Anonymous Penguin on 2005-09-01 00:32:04 GMT from Italy)
Not very tempted to try it. KDE 3.2.1??? A 2 CDs RPM distro? I bet that CentOS or BLAG (in their different roles) are many times better.Very disappointing. With so many people involved one could have expected a lot better than this.55 • 15 minute with Asianux (by IMQ on 2005-09-01 01:32:50 GMT from United States)
Just installed the distro. Here are my initial observations:

1. The lists of programs per catergory are small. For a 2-CD set, I expect more apllications available to users. No listing of graphic viewer, no graphical ftp program, no bittorrent, etc.2. I coudn't find the option to run update anywhere in the menu. Tried both apt & yum. Neither one available.3. The only desktop available from the login screen is KDE.

My first thought is that this is definitely not for home desktop. Maybe I have to do some digging to see what apps are installed. Maybe the 2-CD set contains lots of server apps and just barebone desktop app. No koffice, no OpenOffice.org, no office of any kind.

Maybe when I have more time, I come back and look deeper under the surface. As it stands, it's definitely not anywhere near attractive/interesting as major distros such as SUSE, Fedore, Mandriva, etc.56 • RE: 15 minute with Asianux (by Anonymous Penguin on 2005-09-01 01:53:06 GMT from Italy)
Thanks IMQ.Clearly it is not a distro I want to waste my time on.57 • RE: RE: 15 minute with Asianux (by IMQ on 2005-09-01 03:38:36 GMT from United States)
I think the users will get better desktop options with Red-Hat-Enterprise-Linux clones such as CentOS, Scientifc Linux, Whitebox, X/OS, etc.

On top of that and more importantly, there are no community support forums to get help with problem users run into. Well, I am not aware of one.58 • re elive pretty neat live but.... (by Christophe Grandsire on 2005-09-01 16:21:31 GMT from Netherlands)
Anonymous Penguin:

What you say isn't quite right. Debian, for instance, by default disallows root to log in graphically. You have to change the settings of GDM to allow for it.

At the same time, I don't see the point of running as root. There's no practical gain for the loss of security. At least on my computer there's nothing to do that requires me to log in graphically as root. If I want a root terminal, it's just one click away (and giving the password to gksu). Same with Synaptic, or anything that needs root rights. And I can play and burn CDs and DVDs, watch videos and play games, print whatever I want, without having to log in as root.

To me, wanting to run as root means:- either that your distro isn't correctly set up out of the box, and restricts normal users beyond what's acceptable,- or that you have a masochistic streak in your personality, and want to test Murphy's Law to its limits :) . This is a perfectly valid excuse, but don't ever approach my computer please ;) (I actually set up a special "invitee" account, that has even less rights than normal users ;) ).

In any case, I don't believe there is any advantage to run as root, unless you want to copy Windows's behaviour, and what's the point of that?59 • re elive pretty neat live but.... (by Anonymous Penguin on 2005-09-01 17:51:27 GMT from Italy)
Please I don't want to start the discussion whether running as root is bad or not all over again, it has been discussed zillions of times. Not everybody agrees that it is such a stupid thing to do, see for instance the opinion of Peter van der Linden, here:

Advantages? Makes my life a lot easier (at least that is how i feel about it)Disadvantages? None so far after many years.

As to Debian, it is the GDM default which doesn't allow root login, but that takes 2 seconds to change. Once logged in the working environment is absolutely the same.60 • Re: aLinux for smb media server and Installation (by Clint Canada on 2005-09-01 19:31:36 GMT from Philippines)
Hi there...

It was not placed in the repository yet, because lots of packages are undergoing cleanup - Jay told me.

I agree with you though about the installer, I do find it a bit confusing for newbies (I find peanut 9.5 as having the most logical install ever)... but don't worry a graphical installer is in the works.... hopefully.

He's practically a one-man compiling machine. :)61 • Donation (by d00m3d on 2005-09-02 15:24:45 GMT from China)
Despite most DW readers suggested and agreed MPLAYER to be financed since 2 weeks ago in DWW, I would like to nominate BUSYBOX, http://www.busybox.net/, as the open source project for donation.

Have a look at http://www.busybox.net/products.html, one can easily find that BUSYBOX, not only help out various mini-distros, but is also employed in many installer projects from major distros like Debian, RedHat, Gentoo, Slackware and MDK etc.

Indeed, BUSYBOX is also a good solution within the initrd when booting Linux from external (USB or IEEE1394) devices. The Archie LiveCD is a typical example.